Software

With PHP, or more precisely the GD library, you can draw filled elliptical arcs, ellipses and circles, but antialiasing is not supported. I have written a PHP function that renders them with antialiasing. Read more

The Amazon® Product Advertising API (formerly know as Amazon Associates Webservices) can be used to access Amazon's product data for advertising purposes. By August 15, 2009, all calls to the API must be signed (with HMAC and SHA-256) to authenticate the request. I have written a PHP and a Python function which build authenticated requests. Read more

Blurring a texture in OpenGL or DirectX applications is a common way to achieve various effects like glow in computer games and virtual reality. Implementing this with pixel shaders is easy, but sometimes applications have to run on older hardware, embedded devices or smart phones with no or limited shader support. The blurring method described in this article only requires the standard built-in bi-linear texture filter and looks similar to the well-known Gaussian blur filter. Read more

Kyoto Tycoon is a lightweight database server with impressive performance. It can be accessed via several protocols, including an efficient binary protocol which is used in this Python library. Read more